Pat Howard: Youthful dream pays off for 25 years and counting

ERIE, Pa. -- A personal milestone slipped by without me noticing right about the time when it would have been in keeping with the season to give thanks for it.

November marked 25 years since Toni Polancy, then the managing editor of the Erie Daily Times -- the late, great afternoon paper where I spent the first half of my career -- gave me my shot out of the blue. I'm still working to make good on it.

A local voice had gone silent on the paper's op-ed page with the retirement of former managing editor and columnist Len Kholos. Polancy let the staff know she was scouting for a successor, and my hand shot up at the prospect.

I started out as a reporter and sometimes copy editor with a vague ambition of becoming a columnist someday. Even my heedless younger self was amazed when it happened at 27.

It was a pinch-yourself kind of thing. When I stop to think of all that's followed, it still is.

I was more prone to verbal slashing and burning in those days. That came with being young and making it up as I went along.

It strikes me in retrospect that it was a bit risky for Polancy to hand a megaphone to a mouthy kid. She was the first in a series of editors who trusted my judgment and had my back.

For years I wrote two columns a week, for Wednesday and Saturday, and for a time was even cranking out three. But the columns have always been an add-on to whatever my main gig was.

That's why this anniversary comes with an asterisk. It denotes the year and a half in the late 1990s when I stopped writing because the press of other duties left no time for it.

My boss at the time, Executive Editor Bob Lloyd, had the sense that some folks missed it. I didn't fully realize until I started writing again how much I did as well.

I jumped back in the game in the Sunday paper, which was another goal realized, and in a new spot. That was almost 15 years ago, and I've been filling this space ever since.

In the 1981 romantic comedy "Continental Divide," John Belushi played an old-school newspaperman loosely based on the legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko. I've always remembered what Belushi's Ernie Souchak replied when somebody suggested he write a novel: "I like writing just my column. It's short."

I can relate. Whatever subject enters my cranium for processing, the result comes out at somewhere around 800 words. It's basically muscle memory at this point.

Plenty of readers have pointedly reminded me, especially since the advent of e-mail made it so easy, that I can be an irritant to parts of the body politic. And there have been times when my seat got to feeling a bit warm when I really hit a nerve on some subject or other.

But I've also made some amazing connections with people over the years. It's still a thrill when readers reach out to tell me my words touched them somehow.

Those background conversations and the knowledge that some folks look forward to my work have been enduring gifts. Their words have touched me as well.

I pretty much knew heading into high school what I wanted to be when I grew up. Reading "All the President's Men" sealed my fate.

But I never aspired to claw my way into the big time of Woodward, Bernstein and Royko. I wanted to do this work in and for my hometown.

I've always said that Erie, with its special character and characters, is a great town for a columnist. For a community of this size, there's a lot to work with.

So much has changed in this business, and in the Erie region, in the decades I've spent pursuing my boyhood ambition. But the 25th birthday of this column -- and writing the last one of the year before my annual holiday hibernation -- reminds me to pause and savor an underlying constant.

My wish came true. How cool is that?

Write to Managing Editor Pat Howard at 205 W. 12th St., Erie, PA 16534, or e-mail him at pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhoward.